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Memorable Proof

by Letitia Huckaby, Jessica Lynne

The stories of the Black South are infinite. We hear them in music. We read them in literature. They move with and through us in dance. When I consider the practice of Letitia Huckaby, I know too that our stories manifest themselves in the photograph. Using photographs as objects to be manipulated, Huckaby stitches together »

How We Exist in the South

Voting for Justice in Southwest Florida

by Ariana Ávila, Lisette Morales McCabe, Lupita Vazquez Reyes, Christina Vazquez

Less than an hour from Southwest Florida’s highly coveted coastlines and palm tree-adorned roadways lies Immokalee, a rural town where a multibillion-dollar agricultural industry booms. Immokalee is home to approximately twenty-seven thousand residents, who compose the immigrant farmworker population of Southwest Florida, including people from Guatemala, Haiti, and Mexico. This community from the Global South »

A Turn to Fiction

by Rob Shapard

In the north Georgia highlands, as the nights were falling earlier and colder, eight young siblings huddled outside a small, run-down cabin. It was 1945. Their mother and grandfather had recently moved the children there with no warning or explanation and alarmingly few provisions. The kids were scared, for good reason, wondering why their mother »

Food

Mudfish

by Zachary Faircloth

Misshapen paleozoic fish, atavist, tired of climbing the evolutionary ladder and waiting for a thumb or feet or the ability to breathe on land, one year you just stepped off and let the others pass you by . . . And do you ever wonder?—That is, what if you had climbed all the way to the »

Poetry

Sea Turtle Sonnet

by Zeina Hashem Beck

Our parents stayed during the civil war.Don’t say we escaped, just that we too failed.We left Beirut on the verge of collapse& revolution. That clearing of hope,where would we be without it? Ask Ziad,who put the city on a stage & laughedat its slow ways of killing us with pillsor memory. So many of us »

Essay

These Are Revolutionary Times

Back Porch

by Marcie Cohen Ferris

“The right to vote remains the most essential key to freedom and choice in all aspects of our lives.” As we move through these fraught days in America, watching with horror the incomprehensible destruction and death in Israel, Gaza, and Ukraine, I ponder if we are living in more historic, troubling times than generations before »

Essay

The South’s Democracy Struggle Reaches New Urgency

by Benjamin Barber

“The current iteration of voter suppression that has swept across the South has been met by renewed organizing efforts that remain determined to fully restore the Voting Rights Act and secure the promise of democracy.” The South has often served as the crucible for democracy, and in recent years, the COVID pandemic, new voting restrictions, »

Essay

The Rhetoric and the Reality of the New Southern Strategy

by Courtland Cox, Nsé Ufot, Charles V. Taylor, Emilye Crosby

“I think that white voters in the South are more nuanced than people think. I know that Black voters are more nuanced than folks think. And we have to begin to engage with the electorate in a different way because folks don’t want to engage with the South, but the South engages with you.” Courland »

Essay

Voting Rights in Georgia

A Short History

by Orville Vernon Burton, Peter Eisenstadt

“[The 2020 Democratic victory] was the culmination of a century and a half of efforts by Black citizens in Georgia to be able to vote, and the first election in the state’s history when the power of white conservatives and the presumption of white supremacy were decisively defeated.” Before the enactment of the Voting Rights »

Essay

“White supremacy in North Carolina rests in woman’s hands”

Dr. Delia Dixon-Carroll and the Power of White Women Voters

by Angela Page Robbins

When women gained the right to vote in 1920, many southern suffragists worried about turnout. The antisuffrage campaign had vigorously questioned the wisdom of allowing women to step out of the domestic sphere, thereby upending conventional gender norms, and into the political sphere, where they might compete with men for power and influence. Dr. Delia »

Photo Essay

A Real Evidence of Community

Poll Worker Portraits in the North Carolina Piedmont

by Kate Medley

As Georgia poll workers came under fire for alleged election fraud in the 2020 presidential election, the accusations stood in stark contrast to my own experiences as a poll worker in North Carolina during the same election. I had signed myself up in response to the urgent plea for poll workers amidst the pandemic, when »

Essay

“Blocks for Freedom”

Sewing for Voting in Post-Jim Crow Mississippi

by William Sturkey

“‘Blocks for Freedom’ helped dozens of poor Black Mississippi women fight for the right to vote—not with marches and sit-ins but through making clothes, selling lunches, and hosting concerts.” In 1966, two women from drastically different backgrounds launched an innovative campaign to protect African American women’s voting rights in Mississippi. Oberia Holliday was a thirty-four-year-old »